Chapter 2: Make My Way Back Home

Burbank, California

October 27, 1998

Jake had never flown on a low-cost airliner before, but he booked a $110 ticket on West Coast Airlines because of the convenience. WCA was the only carrier that flew nonstop into Burbank Airport from Sea-Tac on a daily basis. Flying into Burbank was much more efficient and accessible for everyone involved. Though he had recently spent nearly twenty thousand dollars to charter a flight from Teterboro, New Jersey to Seattle just to avoid sitting in coach, he figured he could put up with the cattle call conditions aboard WCA for the short, two-hour hop. It was a mistake he would never make again.

Since he had never flown such a carrier before, he had not realized that there was no assigned seating. One simply claimed an empty seat when one boarded the aircraft. The boarding was done by groups—A, B, C, and D groups—with each group consisting of thirty-six passengers on a full plane (and Jake’s flight was indeed full). The concept of charging extra money to be bumped up to an earlier group had yet to occur to anyone in WCA’s management, so one’s group was assigned by the order in which the tickets were purchased. Jake was one of the last to book, having done it the night before the flight, so he was in Group D and one of the last three passengers to go down the jetway. By the time he boarded the 737 every last aisle and window seat was already taken, leaving only three middle seats to choose from. He chose one near the very back of the plane, between an overweight guy in a Butthole Surfers sweater and a painfully skinny bleach blonde woman. He chose poorly, he soon found out.

The fat guy smelled really bad. He apparently believed that regular bathing was not necessary as long as he had a steady supply of Old Spice to dump all over himself. As such, he exuded the odor of rancid BO combined with an overdose of cloyingly sweet cheap cologne. He also fell asleep before they even pushed back from the gate and snored loudly the entire trip. The woman—who was obviously no stranger to methamphetamine based on her pockmarked skin, emaciated build, and several missing teeth—talked to him with an annoying, grating lisp the entire flight, jabbering on and on about how she was one day going to be a hairstylist for the rich and famous in Hollywood (though she was currently unemployed and did not actually possess a cosmetology license) and about all of the famous people she rubbed elbows with in LA (she claimed she went to church with Magic Johnson, had once had season tickets for the Lakers right behind Jack Nicholson, and had gone on a few dates with Johnny Depp) with no apparent inkling of just who she was sitting next to.

Never again, Jake vowed to himself when he finally managed to work his way down the aisle and escape onto the jetway some twenty-five minutes after the wheels had touched down on the runway. Call me an elitist fucking snob if you will, but I will never fly like that again, not even if I’m only going LA to Vegas or San Diego, not even if I need to go home in a hurry because my Mom or Dad is dying.

Since he only had his travel bag he did not have to visit the baggage carousel. He used his cellphone to call Laura as he made the hike to the terminal exit with the rest of the cattle from his and various other arrivals. He had to wait another five minutes or so at the curb before his F-150 appeared and pulled into an empty spot in the loading zone. Laura was behind the wheel. Pauline was in the passenger seat. Caydee and Meghan were in the back seat. All of Laura’s, Meghan’s, and Caydee’s baggage was in the bed.

Laura stepped out of the cab and embraced him warmly, kissing him affectionately on the mouth. She then wrinkled her nose. “Oh my God,” she said. “What is that smell?”

“That would be my seatmate,” he said sourly.

“Gross,” she said. “You had to sit next to someone who smells like that for two hours?”

“Two hours was just the flight time,” Jake said. “Add another twenty minutes from boarding to takeoff and then another twenty from landing to escape.”

“Gross,” she said again. “Maybe you should ride in the back with the luggage.”

“I’ll roll the window down,” he promised.

He tossed his bag in the back of the truck and then climbed into the driver’s seat. Laura wedged herself into the back seat next to Caydee, who was strapped into the middle position in her car seat.

“Dada!” Caydee yelled happily when she saw him. “Dada dive!”

“That’s right, Caydee girl,” Jake told her, reaching back to caress her face. “Daddy’s gonna drive us to the airport so we can fly home.”

“Dada dive! Dada fye!”

“Dada kinda stinks,” Pauline said, getting a whiff of him.

“Dada tinks!” Caydee cried, thrilled that someone other than she was being accused of that for once.

“Yeah, sorry,” Jake apologized. “That’s what I get for flying Greyhound in the sky. Maybe Caydee can poop for us and improve the ambience a bit.”

“It’s worth a shot,” said Pauline.

“What are you doing here anyway?” Jake asked his sister. “Are you coming home with us?”

“Yeah, I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Obie and Tabby are up in Oregon right now. I was supposed to be with them but having to deal with the Matt situation derailed me. Now that the worst of the crisis is past, I gotta get away from the shitshow for a little bit. And, since we have some things to discuss, it seemed like going to the cliff with you was the best thing.”

“Shitshow!” Caydee yelled and then giggled. “Shitshow, shitshow, shitshow!”

“That’s not a nice word, Caydee,” Meghan admonished.

“Shitshow, shitshow, shitshow!” Caydee responded.

“Cadence Elizabeth,” Meghan said sternly.

“Oh, fuck it,” Jake told the nanny dismissively. “She hears a lot worse than that hanging out with me.”

“Fuck it!” Caydee agreed. “Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it!”

Meghan gave a disapproving look to Jake. He ignored it. Laura just shook her head and rolled her window down a little bit.

“Anyway,” Jake told his sister (who was grinning at Caydee’s antics), “you’re always welcome at our home. You know that.” He turned to look over his shoulder at Laura. “Did you let Elsa know Paulie’s coming?”

“Yeah, a few hours ago,” Laura said. “She’s going to make spaghetti and garlic bread for dinner.”

“With her homemade sauce?” asked Meghan hopefully.

“Of course,” Jake told her. “Elsa would die before she would use jarred sauce. And I mean that quite literally.”

“Do you suppose, however,” asked Laura, “that we could swing by the Granada Hills house for a few minutes?”

“Drive past Whiteman and go all the way to the hills?” Jake asked. “Why would we do that?”

“So you can take a shower and change your clothes,” she said. “I don’t really want to be cooped up in an airplane with you smelling like you currently do.”

“Amen to that,” said Pauline.

And so, he did it. Caydee kept them entertained on the drive by singing her version of Do-Ra-Mi, which consisted of mostly the syllables of the opening verse, with heavy emphasis on the Do’s, Ra’s, and Mi’s. Though she could not say most of the words to the tune, she could sing the syllables mostly in key and only a little bit out of time.

Jake stripped off his clothes and put them in garbage bag that he tied up tightly. He then showered, making sure to drench himself in body wash and let it sit on his body for a bit before rinsing it off. He washed his hair and then conditioned it. By the time he dried off he felt and smelled human again.

They all climbed back in the truck and made the drive to Whiteman airport. It took about twenty-five minutes to get everything loaded up and to get a flight plan filed. Finally, they roared into the sky for home. Pauline sat in the copilot seat while Laura and Caydee sat in the seats behind them (both promptly fell asleep immediately after takeoff). Meghan sat in the back row of non-couch seats. She enjoyed flying in Jake’s plane but did not like facing backwards while she did it.

“All right,” Jake said once they were up above ten thousand and the autopilot had the plane, “let’s compare notes and see where we stand.”

“Sounds good,” Pauline agreed. “How’s Matt doing? Let’s start with that.”

“As I told you on the phone, he went through with the surgery. It was a little touch and go right up to the morning of, but he sucked it up and went through with it.”

“Crow and Doolittle were very upset with you for not letting Gahn visit Matt before the surgery,” Pauline said. “They collectively called me at least six times trying to convince me to talk Matt into just doing the stents. They even had Frowley call and try to claim that the Catastrophic Circumstances clause of the contract did not apply in this situation and that we were in breach of contract if Matt had to cancel the rest of the tour because of heart surgery.”

“Really?” Jake asked, shaking his head. “What was his logic behind that opinion?”

“That since it was within Matt’s control to undergo a simpler treatment that would allow him to go back to work in four weeks but he was choosing the treatment that would result in cancellation of the tour, he was voluntarily waiving KVA’s rights under the provision.”

“That’s a bunch of bullshit,” Jake said. He then looked over at his sister. “Isn’t it?”

“Complete bullshit and a typical Frowley bluff,” she confirmed. “I don’t know why he keeps thinking he can pull one over on me like that. He’s like the fuckin’ coyote trying to catch the roadrunner.”

“Good analogy,” Jake said.

“I thought so,” she said. “Anyway, I told him that if he thought he could convince a judge and jury that putting off life-saving surgery just so Matt could keep touring was a reasonable course of action for National Records to demand, then go ahead and file for breach of contract. ‘It will be fun,’ I told him, ‘humiliating you in the courtroom and making you look like the heartless assholes that you are.’ He abandoned that line of suggestion after that.”

“That guy is such a sleazeball,” Jake said.

“Even other lawyers think he’s sleazy,” Pauline said. “How is Matt doing after the surgery?”

“He was kind of miserable when I talked to him last,” Jake said. “His chest hurt every time he took a breath or moved his shoulders. He had a huge surgical incision on his leg where they took out the graft. And he had one of those fuckin’ catheters in his schlong. That was what seemed to bother him the most. He kept telling the nurses to take it out but they wouldn’t do it. Said it had to stay in for forty-eight hours post-surgery so they could monitor his kidney function or some shit like that.”

Pauline nodded. She had done a little time with a catheter inserted right after Tabitha had been born due to the lingering aftereffects of the spinal block. It was not one of her fond memories of the childbirth experience. “How long will he stay in the hospital?”

“Another five days at least,” Jake said. “Assuming he doesn’t sign out AMA—which is always a possibility when you’re talking about Matt.”

“True,” she agreed. “What happens after that? Is he coming home or going to stay in Seattle for a while?”

“He wants to get home as soon as he can. He wants to come back the same day he is discharged, but the doctor said he needs to wait at least two weeks before it’s safe to fly.”

“Two weeks? How come?”

“Apparently the change in air pressure from sea level to eight thousand feet is not a good idea until the vessels and his sternum have healed a bit.”

“Oh ... I guess that makes sense. Well, Seattle is not such a bad place to be stuck in. It could have been worse.”

“Yeah,” Jake agreed. “This could’ve happened in Cincinnati or Salt Lake City. Now that would suck ass.”

“True that,” she agreed.

“I saw the news coverage on the tour cancellation,” he said. “Lots of wild-ass speculation going on.”

“Yeah,” she said sourly. She and National had not disclosed what had actually happened to Matt yet. Pauline had simply announced that he had ‘a medical issue that would prevent him from performing until mid to late spring’ and that the tour was cancelled until then. The entertainment media was reporting pretty much everything but what had actually happened. The most common report was that Matt had overdosed on heroin like Darren and was on life support and was likely brain dead. The second most common was that he had overdosed on cocaine, had ruptured a blood vessel in his brain, and was most likely brain dead on a ventilator waiting for his family to decide whether or not to donate his organs. The third most common was that he had been shot and/or stabbed and was lingering on life support waiting for his family to decide whether or not to donate his organs.

“We’re going to have to release what actually happened at some point, right?” Jake asked.

“Yes, and soon,” she agreed. “Frankly, I’m quite amazed that the story hasn’t been broken yet. I know that patient privacy is a bigger thing these days then it was when Darren ended up in the hospital, but there are an awful lot of people in that hospital who know what is actually going on with Matt. Eventually one of them is going to be ‘an anonymous source’ and let it slip to some reporter in exchange for a couple pictures of Ben Franklin.”

“That might have already happened,” Jake suggested. “It could be that the truth is just boring and they’d rather talk about heroin overdoses and brain bleeds.”

She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “In any case, I want to talk to Matt tonight and feel him out about going public with this. There is no real reason not to.”

“Okay,” Jake said. “I’ll call him as soon as we get home and see what he thinks. What about the tour? Are they heading back in yet?”

“They broke everything down and put it back in the trucks yesterday,” Pauline said. “The band flew home on the charter plane this morning. The rest of the crew are on their way in the trucks and the buses.”

“Including Gahn?” Jake asked.

“He flew home with the band,” Pauline confirmed. “Once Matt went forth with the surgery there was no reason for him to stay.”

“At least there’s that,” Jake said.

“Yep.”

“Are all the tour dates now officially cancelled?”

“As of yesterday, yes,” she confirmed. “Jill is still working on the final numbers, but KVA and National will be charged somewhere in the vicinity of two million dollars in cancellation fees from the venues. Tack onto that another two hundred and fifty grand or so in contract penalties from TicketKing for having to refund multi-millions in ticket sales.”

“The insurance company is going to pick that up though, right?”

“Right,” she said, “minus the fifteen-thousand-dollar deductible, of course.”

“Of course,” he said sourly.

“And, since a fair portion of KVA’s profit for the third quarter—which was dropped into the account two days before this shit hit the fan—included ticket sales for shows that have now been cancelled, we’ll have to pay that money back to TicketKing. Of course, we’re going to audit TicketKing’s numbers to make sure they’re not playing games with the figures, but that audit will be at our expense. That will be somewhere in the vicinity of thirty grand.”

“What a shitshow,” Jake said sadly.

“Shitshow,” mumbled Caydee from within her slumber. “Fuck it.”

Jake smiled. “Couldn’t have said it better myself, little girl,” he told her.

Matt had been moved from the cardiac ICU to the Progressive Care Unit, which was a stepdown unit where they put people who did not need the full-on ICU services but were still a little too complex to go to the regular telemetry floor. At least he had a private room in the PCU. That was about all the good there was to be said about the experience.

He was sitting in his chair next to the bed at 5:05 PM, just twenty-seven hours after they had brought him out of anesthesia after chopping open his fucking chest and rewiring four of the arteries in his heart. He was not sitting in the chair because he wanted to sit in the chair. He wanted nothing more than to stay in that hideous hospital bed and lay as still as possible and take as shallow of breaths as possible. He hurt in multiple places all over his body, but every time he moved anything, one of the pains or the other would ratchet up like the needle on a mixing board.

The most painful part, and the easiest to aggravate, was his sternum. It had been chopped open and spread apart for the surgery and was now wired back together with the skin fused with some sort of adhesive. There was a blood-stained bandage covering it currently—a bandage that each nurse at the beginning of his or her shift insisted upon looking under. Every breath he took ground those bones together and sent pain radiating throughout his being. He instinctively tried to keep his breathing as shallow as possible but the nurses did not like him doing that and kept harassing him to breathe deeper. And if he coughed—which he did with fair frequency because his throat was irritated from the fucking tube they had put down to breathe for him during the surgery—the pain became exquisite; almost, but not quite as intense as the pain of being cardioverted while awake and un-sedated that time in Houston. He feared how much it was going to hurt if he had to sneeze and now lived in terror of that normal bodily function occurring.

But the incision was not the only thing going on with his chest. He had a pair of chest tubes protruding from him just to the left of the fractured sternum and just below his left nipple. They were connected to little plastic squeeze containers into which a nasty looking thin red gruel consistently drained and was emptied out two or three times each nursing shift. They were both sources of significant pain as well. And then there was the incision on the inside of his right leg where they had harvested the vein graft they used to rewire his heart. That incision—which was also covered with a bloody bandage that was checked and changed once a shift—ran from just above the knee to six inches below his groin. It constantly throbbed with a burning pain that got worse with any movement of the leg. And, of course, there was the fucking tube in his schlong that was draining the contents of his bladder into a big plastic bag that hung on a hook attached to the bed. Just having the fucking thing installed made it feel like he desperately had to piss all the time—a sensation that was far from a comfortable one. But when it moved in any way, the piss sensation turned quickly to pain that manifested all along his urinary tract. Why, he wondered miserably, were there so many fucking nerve endings in a person’s urinary tract? What was the point of that shit?

And then there were the IV lines. Though he was not currently attached to any drips or fluids, he still had two regular IVs installed in his left arm, something called a “central line” installed in the right side of his neck, and something called an “art line” installed in the left side of his neck. All of these access points throbbed with varying degrees of discomfort as well.

Part of Matt’s misery was of his own making. They kept trying to push IV fentanyl or IV Demerol on him but he refused to allow it. Like Jake, he remembered that Darren’s road to heroin addiction had started after he was given Demerol shots to deal with the pain of his burns and had ended with him dead from an overdose in his living room a few years later. He did not want to take even a single step down that path and so he was trying to suck up fresh post-surgical pain using only ibuprofen and Tylenol. It was a little bit like trying to put out a forest fire by pissing on it.

And now he was in this goddamn chair and all of the pains were throbbing simultaneously. Carol, the middle-aged swing shift nurse who worked from 3:00 PM to 11:30 PM, had insisted that he get out of the bed and sit in the chair for at least an hour. And furthermore, she told him that he would now be expected to sit in the chair at least four hours out of every day and that starting tomorrow they were going to start having him walk around in the corridors.

“Walk? Are you kidding me?” he asked when she finally got him into the chair for the first time—it had been a very painful ordeal that involved him holding a pillow to his chest and rocking until he could put his feet on the floor without separating the sternum. “I can barely get out of the fuckin’ bed.”

“It will get easier each time you do it,” she assured him.

“Why can’t I wait until I heal a little before I have to start doing this shit?” he asked.

“Because if you stay in bed until then, you’ll end up with bed sores, your stamina will decrease very quickly, and you will likely develop post-operative pneumonia, which would not be fun with a sternal incision. We want our bypass surgery patients up and on their feet the day after surgery. That’s what gets you out of the hospital in five days instead of a month.”

Once he was settled into the chair, she picked up a little plastic thing that looked like a cheap bong with a hose attached to it. An incentive spirometer it was called. The idea was to suck on the hose like you were taking a bong hit out of it, but that was not what you were doing. Instead, you were using the force of your inhalation to lift a little yellow plastic ball up the tube, which was marked with numbers from 500 at the bottom to 5000 at the top. The harder you sucked, the higher the ball would go and the larger the number it would reach. So far, Matt had barely been able to get the little ball past 1000 before the pain made him stop.

“I don’t want to do that again,” he told Carol, shaking his head.

“Well,” she said in her matter-of-fact nurse’s voice, “I don’t want to pay taxes every paycheck, but I still have to.”

“Hey now,” Matt said sourly. “That’s kind of a sore subject with me.”

“Sorry,” she said, sounding anything but. “Now take a hit.” She picked up his right hand and put the spirometer into it.

Matt sighed and took the device from her. Carol was a tough old babe and not someone you said no to easily. He knew she would just keep harassing him until he did it. He put the end of the hose in his mouth and sucked. The pain rippled through his fractured sternum immediately and impressively.

“More, more,” Carol encouraged. “Come on, Matt. You can do it.”

He sucked until the pain became too much to bear. He then let his breath out and the little yellow ball dropped back to the bottom of the tube.

“Eleven hundred,” Carol said, shaking her head. “That’s pathetic. I want at least two thousand out of you, preferably twenty-five hundred.”

“It hurts when I do that,” Matt told her.

“No pain, no gain,” she told him. “And if you would just take some of the pain medication, it would be easier.”

“I ain’t touching any of that shit,” he said. “If you gave me an actual bong with some good bud in it, I’d suck a lot harder though. That’s the kind of incentive I need.”

“Our administration frowns upon bonghits in the PCU,” she said. “And you really need to take something for the pain. If you don’t start taking deeper breaths you are going to get pneumonia, Matt.”

“I don’t want to start taking that shit and end up on a ventilator with botulism like Darren,” he said. “I have a bit of an addictive personality, you see.”

“I’ve heard that,” Carol said, “but this is different. This situation is what the medicines are made for.”

He shook his head. “No Demerol, no fentanyl, no fuckin’ morphine,” he insisted. “I ain’t going down that road.”

“How about a pill then?” she asked.

“What kind of pill?”

“I have standing orders for Percocet every six hours if you need it,” she said. “It’s not as good as the IV meds, but it’ll take the edge off for you a lot better than the Tylenol and the Motrin.”

“It’s a narcotic, right?” he asked.

“It is,” she said.

“Is there anything else?”

“Nothing that is going to work for you,” she said. “Why don’t you try one? It will make you a lot more comfortable.”

He thought about this for a moment and then looked up at her. “How about we make a deal?” he asked.

“What kind of deal?”

“You take this fuckin’ tube out of my schlong and I’ll take one of those Percocets.”

She frowned a little. “Standard procedure is to keep the urinary catheter in for forty-eight hours,” she said. “You still have about nineteen hours to go.”

“Why does it need to stay in that long?” he asked.

“Because sometimes there is spasming in the urinary tract post-surgery,” she said. “Also, having it in there makes it easy for us to monitor your urine output and make sure your kidneys are working the way they should.”

“Are my kidneys working the way they should?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You labs and your urine output both indicate normal kidney function.”

“Then take the goddamn thing out of there,” he said. “I promise I’ll piss. And I’ll do it in those jars so you can measure it if you want.”

“What if you don’t piss?” she asked.

“Then you put the thing back in,” he said. “Does that sound fuckin’ reasonable?”

She thought this over for a moment. “Actually, it does,” she said. “Let me just call the doctor and make sure he’s okay with this. While I’m doing that, keep hitting that spirometer. I want you to do at least ten.”

“Right, ten,” he said, nodding.

She left the room. He did not hit the spirometer while she was gone. When she returned ten minutes later with a large syringe and a washcloth in hand, he lied and told her that he had done twelve hits. It was quite obvious that she did not believe him.

“All right,” she said. “The doctor says that I can take the catheter out as long as you agree to take the Percocet and as long as you understand that if you don’t pee in three hours it goes back in.”

“Deal,” he said. “Now get it out. Do I have to get back in the bed for this?”

“No,” she said. “I can remove it from where you are.”

She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and then unceremoniously rucked up the hem of his hospital gown, exposing his penis with the yellow tube snaking out of it. She lifted up his scrotum and tucked the washrag underneath it. She then grabbed hold of the shaft of his penis and lifted up on it. When his penis was moved, the pain in the urinary tract flared.

“Damn, baby,” Matt complained. “That’s my schlong you got there. It ain’t the fuckin’ gearshift on a Corvette!”

“Sorry,” she said, again, sounding anything but. “I’m going to deflate the balloon now.” She plugged the syringe into a port a little downstream of where the tube entered his body. She pulled back on it and the syringe filled with clear water.

“You know,” Matt told her, “my schlong is usually a lot bigger than that. Having that tube in there made it shrink up.”

“Uh huh,” said Carol, who had quite literally seen more penises than a career prostitute and was quite unimpressed with any of them. “Take a deep breath. This is going to smart a bit.”

That turned out to be one of the biggest understatements Matt had ever heard. As she pulled the tube out of him it felt like she was pulling on a rope embedded with jagged bits of broken glass. The pain of the removal momentarily overrode every other ache and pain in his body, making a sweat break out on his forehead.

“Holy fucking shit!” he barked, panting a little.

“Now remember,” she told him, holding up the bag so she could see how much pee was in it for charting purposes, “you have to pee in the next three hours or it’s going back in.”

“I’ll piss, I promise!” Matt said desperately. And then something occurred to him. “Is it going to hurt when I piss?”

“It might smart a bit on the first few urinations,” she told him.

He looked at her in alarm. “Why don’t you go get me that pain pill now?”

“I’ll be right back,” she said with a smile.

The Percocet did help. The pain did not go away, but it faded down considerably and Matt just did not care about it as much. He did not really enjoy the sensation of narcotic intoxication. His head felt swimmy and his thoughts were slow and strange. He could not concentrate on anything, which was much different than when he smoked some good ganja or blew a few rails. He also felt vaguely nauseous once the pill took full effect.

Why do people like this shit so much? he wondered. This is one of the shittiest highs I’ve ever had.

Still, he found he was able to take deeper breaths, was able to get the incentive spirometer up to 2100 and do it consistently ten times in a row (Carol watched him to make sure he actually did it). And when she helped him get back into the bed it was not nearly as painful (though it did still hurt like a motherfucker). And when he finally squeezed out that first post-catheter piss, it only burned a little.

“Very good, Matt,” Carol said, pleased with him as she took his urinal into the bathroom to empty it. “At this rate, you’ll be walking around by tomorrow.”

“When does all this other shit come out?” he asked.

“We’ll take the chest drains out when they stop draining,” she said. “The art line and central line will come out at the same time. That usually takes about three days or so in normal cases. The IVs you will keep until you leave.”